Lion King

Ian McShane rules on NBC.

“Kings,” a new NBC drama, inspired by the Biblical story of King David and set in what seems to be the near future, is about new beginnings, or, looked at another way, about the continuity of history, but there is an end-of-days feel to it in at least one sense: “new NBC drama” is a phrase that will become largely a thing of the past this fall, when Jay Leno takes over the network’s 10 P.M. time slot, Monday through Friday. Another new NBC drama, “Southland,” a police show set in Los Angeles, begins on April 9th, but it, too, has the Ghost of NBC Past’s fingers on it. It will succeed “ER” (and comes from the production team of John Wells, “ER” ’s creator), which ends on April 2nd, after fifteen seasons—fifteen seasons of drama you could count on being there same night, same time, every fall, every year, with each season but one lasting a now almost unthinkable twenty-two episodes or more. Not that it isn’t time for “ER” to go; it’s just that its departure reminds one of the ongoing unravelling of the old system, though those reminders, as the series winds down, have been interrupted briefly and sweetly by the pleasure of seeing cameos by the show’s early stars. Admit it: you really, really liked seeing Julianna Margulies and George Clooney share the screen again, as they did two weeks ago, and finding out that their characters, Nurse Carol Hathaway and Dr. Doug Ross, were still together after all these years.

“Kings” airs on Sundays, which seems appropriate, given the show’s origins in old-time religion—not to mention the fact that Sunday nights still ring with the echoes of a magnificent performance by the star of “Kings,” Ian McShane, in the HBO series “Deadwood,” cancelled, too soon, two and a half years ago. Now, as then, he plays a vigorous, brutal, sympathetic, ragingly leonine, charismatic character; in the NBC show he is King Silas, the leader of the newly unified kingdom of Gilboa, whose capital, Shiloh, is being inaugurated as the series starts. At the beginning of the first episode, we alternate between scenes at an idyllic farm, where a family is watching Silas’s speech on television, and scenes at the capital, as Silas walks through the palace and out onto a balcony overlooking a vast crowd. (Think Obama’s Inauguration.) The size of Silas’s ego matches the size of the moment, and he speaks in a booming voice of the work that went into transforming “the ruins that would become Shiloh.” What was there before was “nothing—ashes, an empty shell of a city bombed ten times over by three armies.” He tells of an epiphany that changed his life, the sign from God that told him he was meant to bring long-warring factions to peace: butterflies appeared and danced in the air above him, and then came to light on his head in the form of a crown. Meanwhile, back on the farm, David Shepherd (Chris Egan), a golden youth nearing manhood, whose father died in the war for unification, has had his eyes opened as well; the King’s religious conscience, Reverend Samuels (Eamonn Walker), had car trouble on his way to the ceremony in Shiloh and alighted, so to speak, at the farm. David, a mechanic, fixed the problem easily. Then Reverend Samuels, as a courtesy, wiped a smudge from David’s forehead. The gesture clearly meant something, and David knows it; the look in his eyes tells us that he’s been touched by destiny. We skip ahead two years, and David is a soldier in the desert, fighting Gilboa’s enemy, Gath. This is where that destiny takes shape; disobeying orders, he crosses enemy lines to free two Gilboan hostages and, against all odds, succeeds, by taking out a menacing tank that has the word “Goliath” painted across its front.

Obvious, yes, and deliberately so. The story’s bone structure is always evident, but “Kings” manages not to seem patly transported into some random future, where burlap is now Kevlar and slingshots are laser sticks. It’s imaginative, and its familiar outlines don’t prevent it from being engrossing moment by moment. In fact, it’s engrossing in a rather maddeningly clever way, in the sense that you can’t tell exactly when the series is taking place. It could be ten years from now, it could be thirty years from now, or it could be that the world being depicted is an alternative version of the one we’re in right now; it looks like it, give or take a few buildings and the place-names. Watching the show, you feel a tension as you try to decide whether it’s holding a mirror up to the present or whether it’s making an argument about where the world may soon be headed. We have already noticed, in the aerial establishing shots of Shiloh, that “Kings” is filmed in Manhattan, and that the city isn’t just a film location. It’s never stated, but it’s clear that Shiloh was New York City, before it was destroyed to the point where even its name disappeared. There are inconsistencies that give you pause: the Time Warner Center is still standing—in fact, it’s the home of the King’s court—but the Empire State Building, I noticed with an actual start, is gone, as is the Chrysler Building. A tall building that resembles the planned Freedom Tower is (thanks to special effects) in midtown. The exterior of the palace is a well-known apartment building, the Apthorp, on the Upper West Side, a block from Zabar’s and H & H Bagels. (We don’t see those emporiums in the show, but I’m going to assume that they still exist in the world of “Kings”; otherwise, let me tell you, there is real cause for despair in the realm.)

David, after his triumph in the desert, becomes an instant folk hero, a status that he can’t avoid, since one of the hostages he saved was Silas’s son, Jack (Sebastian Stan), and, besides, a camera captured an iconic image of David standing in front of the Goliath tank. Silas instinctively knows that David is someone he must keep an eye on—this largehearted young man could be of use to him, or he could be a threat. Silas “rewards” him with a post in Shiloh as a military press liaison—the last thing that a true soldier would want. Sure enough, David chafes at how life in the big city just keeps rolling along: his former company is fighting just a few hours away and yet “it’s as if nothing’s happening except on TV.”

“Kings” is about David’s journey and his inevitable clashes with Silas, but there’s also a fair amount of intrigue and family psychodrama all around them, which makes “Kings” almost as much fun as “Dynasty.” Jack is gay, and bitter about David’s golden-boy position in the court. (Little does he realize that his father has come close to having David killed.) In public, Silas’s wife, Rose (Susanna Thompson, from “Once and Again”), is a non-threatening middle-aged helpmeet, the perfect accessory for a king; behind the scenes, she expertly pulls strings to keep her family in power and her husband and children in line. David early on is drawn to Silas’s daughter, Michelle (Allison Miller), but her mother warns her not to get involved with him, which would be fine with some viewers, as Miller, who is in her early twenties, looks like a generically pretty high-school freshman and makes no impression in the show. Michelle also lobbies her father at court on health-care issues, and is equally uncredible as a policy wonk. Jack’s part, and his ruined appearance—a pulpy mouth and a squinty-eyed look of calculation and overindulgence—are right out of “Gossip Girl”; in fact, Stan appeared on that show in its first season and just brought his Lothario act back last week. Then, there are a few issues going on in the country itself: an impending financial crisis, and a war. The plot is confusing when it comes to the war. For one thing, the show—at least as far as the first few episodes go—has made Shiloh real but not the rest of the kingdom. Apart from the farmhouse where David lived and the desert, we never have a sense of how big the kingdom is, what’s at stake, and whether a battle with the enemy, Gath, over water rights is significant or not—whether it’s the equivalent of Maine trying to steal New Hampshire’s entire eighteen miles of coastline, or just two countries’ egos clashing.

What makes “Kings” compelling is McShane’s tremendous life force and confident storytelling by Michael Green, a former writer and producer of “Heroes,” who created “Kings” and wrote six episodes, and Francis Lawrence, who directed four of them. The masterly camerawork pulled me along—there were great shots that reminded me of comic-book panels in the DC Comics I used to read (as it happens, Green co-wrote a movie version of “Green Lantern” that is coming out next year), where artists were able to depict points of view that cameras couldn’t. Yet the cameras do it in “Kings”; in a good way, watching the show is like reading a comic book.♦

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